…I like the system a lot and have only a couple of reservations. The hardware is great – really solid, the bluetooth stuff for peripherals works better than I expected it to, and the peripherals I’ve gotten for it (DVD remote and headset) both work well. On the software side, the UI on the thing is decent. I have reservations about how the file system works – over time I think it’s going to get too cluttered – but it’s very easy to work with and looks nice. On the game side, SuperStardustHD is literally almost worth the price of admission alone, ridiculous as that sounds. It’s a remake of an old Amiga game which I had heard of but never played, it cost me $10, and I’ve played more of it than anything else on the PS3. It’s best described as a mashup of Asteroids and Robotron 2084, with jaw dropping graphics, amazing physics, and sweat inducing fast paced shootemup action. I absolutely love it. The other games I have are either mediocre (several of the downloaded $10 ones) or decent but unexceptional (Resistance and Warhawk). The machine’s pretty good at online play and I’ve been giving that a lot of time as well. Resistance is great online and I can consistently find 40 player games to run around in. Warhawk just came out and there’s a bug in its server browser (it’s usually lying about how many players are in a server, so 9 times out of 10 you try to connect to a server that appears to have free slots and are booted with a ‘server full’ message.), which is annoying, the more so because the game is a pretty cool battlefield-esque 32 player shooter that features ‘warhawks’ which can transform from jet to helicopter and are a blast to scoot around in.
For movie watching, the ps3 is great. As a DVD player it’s far superior to the dedicated Samsung DVD player I used to have in my stereo rack, and as a BlueRay player it’s equally great. Image and sound quality are both fantastic, there are tons of options for output for audio and video in terms of filtering, upscaling and so on, and the thing is MUCH faster than my older player in terms of getting to the point where a movie is playing and in terms of menu access to all the options. I actually use the PS3 as a video player more than anything else so far, and it caused me to sign up for a netflix account.
As an aside – BlueRay itself is superb, but only when the movies are well mastered. I watched Apocolypto and the quality was fantastic, but I also watched Goodfellas and there were issues. The image quality is so high that with Goodfellas, I could actually see the grain of the film stock and I actually think a fuzzier DVD looks better than Goodfellas did in BlueRay because of this issue.
My biggest concern about the machine remains software – there’s just not that much out there. That’s ok for now, I’ve got things that interest me between now and ~January, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be liking the machine in the gaming wasteland that usually starts in late February. Guess time will tell. Meanwhile, I’m pretty happy with my expensive toy.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 